Internet Radio Signal Pioneers

Dave Hughes Delivers Universal Net Access

Dave Hughes dave@oldcolo.com6 North 24th Street Colorado Springs, CO 80904 Voice 719.660-5764 Fax 719-636-1940Dave Hughes is probably the premier technical and policy facilitator in grass-roots community networking. In 1981, he started what may be the first bulletin board system (BBS) whose goal was to empower the local public politically. Since then, Hughes has traveled around the world in an effort to bring some of the most disenfranchised and isolated communities into the electronic age. "I told my sons to bury me in a grave with space enough for an Internet connection so I can come back and keep giving 'em hell."

A people-owned internet exists. Here is what it looks like The future of the internet is in peril, thanks to surveillance, net neutrality and other assaults. But there are communities that are building their own By Nathan Schneider Jul 26 2017
Like many Americans, I don’t have a choice about my internet service provider. I live in a subsidized housing development where there’s only one option, and it happens to be, by some accounts, the most hated company in the United States. Like its monstrous peers, my provider is celebrating that Congress has recently permitted it to spy on me. Although it pretends to support the overwhelming majority of the country’s population who oppose net neutrality, it has been trying to bury the principle of an open internet for years and, under Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, is making good progress. I can already feel my browsing habits shift. I’m reigning in curiosities a bit more, a bit more anxious about who might be watching. I’ve taken to using a VPN, like people have to do to access the open internet from China. And the real effects go deeper than personal anxieties. Although the fight for an open internet tends to have Silicon Valley tech bros at the forefront, it’s a racial justice issue; arbitrary powers for corporations tend not to help marginalized populations. It’s a rural justice issue, too. The big service providers pushing the deregulation spree are the same companies that have so far refused to bring broadband to less-dense areas. They are holding under-served communities hostage by proposing a deal: roll back rights to private, open media, and we’ll give you cheaper internet. Trump’s Republican party is taking the bait. This is not a deal we need to make. It shouldn’t be necessary to choose between universal access and basic rights. But this deal has been a long time coming, thanks to long campaigns to convince us there is no other way. It turns out, though, there is. Up in the mountains west of me, a decade and a half ago, the commercial internet service providers weren’t bringing high-speed connectivity to residents, so a group of neighbors banded together and created their own internet cooperative. Big providers love making their jobs sound so complicated that nobody else could do it, but these people set up their own wireless network, and they still maintain it. Of course, their service remains pretty rudimentary; the same can’t be said of Longmont, Colorado, a city 20 minutes from where I live in the opposite direction. There, the city-owned NextLight fiber network provides some of the fastest connectivity in the country for a reasonable price. In Longmont, all the surveillance and anti-neutrality stuff simply isn’t relevant. “As a not-for-profit community-owned broadband provider, our loyalty is entirely to our customer-owners,” a spokesman recently told the local paper. “That will not change, regardless of what happens to the FCC regulations in question.” Municipalities across the country, from Santa Monica to Chattanooga, have quietly created their own internet service providers – and for the most part residents love them, especially in comparison to the competition. A major reason more towns haven’t followed suit is that the big telecoms companies have lobbied hard to discourage or outright ban community broadband, pressuring many states to enact legal barriers. It’s happening again in West Virginia. But the tide may be turning. Consumer Reports has taken up a crusade against these restrictions. Colorado has one on the books, but jurisdictions can opt out by referendum. Following Longmont’s example, in the 2016 election, the citizens of 26 cities and counties in the state opened the door to building internet service providers of their own. Local government isn’t the only path for creating internet service accountable to its users. On the far western end of the state, an old energy cooperative called Delta Montrose Electric Association has created a new offering for its member-owners, Elevate Fiber. It delivers a remarkable 100 megabits per second – upload anddownload – to homes for $50 a month. Electric co-ops once brought power to rural areas to people that investor-owned companies wouldn’t serve, and now they’re starting to do the same with broadband. The Obama-era FCC supported these efforts. Donald Trump has voiced support for rural broadband in general, but it remains to be seen whether that will mean subsidies for big corporations, whose existing customers despise them, or opportunities for communities to take control of the internet for themselves. Whatever happens in Washington, we can start building an internet that respects our rights on the local level. What would be the best route for creating community broadband in your community? [snip]

Entrenched interests tried to sue inventor of radio
by Andy Oram Dec. 12, 2001
This date marks a sterling moment in the history of technology: one hundred years ago, on December 12, 1901, Gugliemo Marconi became the first person to pick up radio signals transmitted across an ocean.
The triumph was quickly followed by one of the most ignominious acts in the history of technology: one of the most powerful firms in communications, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, tried to stop Marconi from developing his innovation by threatening a lawsuit.

Women Pioneers
If you would like to see a remarkable US Patent filed by the 'the most beautiful woman in the world' of 1940, actress Hedy Lamarr. The trophy wife of arms merchant Fritz Mandl, she entertained both the German and Italian general staffs as well as Hitler (she was Jewish), and Mussolini themselves. But by 1937 she was tired of being kept, so she drugged her maid and escaped through an open window. She wrangled a ride to the U.S.—and Hollywood—with Louis B. Mayer. There, she happened to meet composer George Antheil, who had written a piece for multiple player pianos. Sitting together at the keyboard, she realized that they were both playing the same piece only an octave apart, which gave her the idea of multiple radio frequencies broadcast one after another from a ship to a torpedo. With the help of an electrical engineer, the idea was patented. But the Navy passed on the idea as ludicrous, and the patent lapsed. Then in 1957, Sylvania Electronics took the idea and developed it for communications; the technology is the basis for all cellular phones today, GPS and is used in the Milstar defense communications satellite as well.

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah
By DAVID KAHN
It is the most romantic story in American cryptology. To keep the Japanese from getting American secrets in World War II, Navajos - among the original Americans - spoke over the radio in their native tongue.

Freeware of interest to contesters and DXersVE3SUN DX Monitor Tools for the Intelligent DXerDownload the latest version
DX Monitor is a standalone Windows program which monitors the DX announcements available on the internet at DX Summit, HB9DRV and connections to one or more local and international DX Cluster Telnet Servers.
New DX spots are displayed in the main window with user selectable bands, fonts, colors, and highlighting of alerts and local spotters. A band map tracks the current stations on the air by frequency. Maps show the openings with buttons to select bands and times.
The predicted signal strength of the spotted station at your QTH can be displayed with each spot. A 24 hour propagation prediction by band takes only one click.
DX Monitor builds a database of DX Spots, Announcements, and WWV information and includes many tools which can be used by DXers to improve their chances of working a new country.

Experiments in airborne BASIC—"buzzing" computer code over FM radio
Before the 'Net, Finland created a primetime program-sharing radio service. A remarkable radio show that changed the landscape for him and a generation of Finnish technology lovers—a show that literally broadcast code over the airwaves. "If you wrote a piece of code in a computer, saved it on a [Commodore] C-cassette, took that cassette out and listened to it with an ordinary cassette recorder you heard sounds," Lehtonen explained. "But as sounds could be copied to another tape and as sounds could be transmitted over radio, then why should it not be possible to receive even these sounds of the code, record them with a C-cassette recorder and have the recorded sounds do their trick in another computer?" In other words—why couldn't you distribute code by simply playing it over the radio while enthusiasts taped it for later use?